Viperdark
by Lomonaaeren
Summary: HPDM slash. If it takes memory after memory for Draco to learn that his Dark Mark doesn't make him ugly, then that's what Harry will give him. COMPLETE.


**Title: **Viperdark

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this for fun and not profit.

**Pairing: **Harry/Draco

**Warnings: **Angst, violence, established relationship

**Rating: **R

**Wordcount: ** 2800

**Summary: **If it takes memory on memory to make Draco see that his Dark Mark doesn't make him ugly, then that's what Harry will do.

**Author's Notes: **Written as an Advent fic for phonixfeder. She asked for Draco wanting to remove the Dark Mark and he and Harry having a discussion in which they come to terms with it.

**Viperdark**

"You did what?"

Draco kept one hand flat on the door, his back turned to Harry. This was the exact reason he hadn't _wanted _to tell Harry that he was going to the Healer to have his Mark removed, he thought. Harry would yell and carry on as though the threat to Draco's life from experimental Healing techniques was greater than the threats Harry faced every day as an Auror.

Draco had left a note on the table just in case the Healing _did _kill him; Harry deserved to know what had happened. But Harry had come home earlier, and read the note, and now they were obviously going to have the argument that Draco had hoped to avoid. Draco pressed his hand further into the wood, grinding it there.

It was only his left hand. It deserved to be punished. Especially when the Healer hadn't managed to remove the Mark anyway.

"Are you going to turn around and face me," Harry asked, his voice utterly flat, "or am I going to have to make you?"

_That _made Draco turn, yes. He could deal with a lot of things, but not Harry threatening him. Harry had his wand drawn, and although it was held loose and low at his side right now, it still made Draco smile in grim amusement. Harry was always so _righteous_, so angry at everything, but Draco had his own past to be angry about.

"By all means," Draco said, and threw his arms wide. He nearly banged into the stupid set of cloaks that Harry had hanging right inside the door. Harry seemed to think that the cloaks, blue and red and green, were necessary to complement the black robes Draco favored. Draco moved further away from them, into the crowded drawing room with its wooden panels on the walls and its Weasley knickknacks on the mantle, not taking his eyes from Harry. "Satisfied?"

Harry responded by grabbing his shoulders and slamming him onto the couch. Draco tried to stand up again, but Harry leaned his weight on him and kept him down. Draco sneered. There were times that he thought it exciting to have a lover who was stronger than he was, but he had always known he would find a disadvantage to it someday. That was the way life worked.

"You're going to tell me why the _hell _you thought paying a Healer to burn the Dark Mark off was worth it," Harry hissed.

Draco paused. The question was different than he had expected, since he had thought Harry was simply going to demand to know why he was risking his life.

"I will try _anything _to get rid of this bloody Mark," he said instead, and lifted his head so that, sitting on the couch or not, he could still look Harry in the eye. "If you knew what I feel about it, the way I hate it, the way I lie awake at night trying to keep myself from scratching it to pieces, then you would know why I thought it was worth it."

For a moment, Harry's nostrils flared, as though he assumed that he had the right to demand more explanation than that. Draco sneered in return. It was the absolute truth, and not even for Harry would he coat that with a comforting lie. He lied to save his own skin and for his own advantage, not for other people.

Harry finally nodded. "Say that I accept you hate it," he said. "Why did you decide to try and destroy it rather than try to come to terms with it?"

Draco rolled his eyes. "Coming to terms is all very well for _Gryffindors_," he said, and saw the shot had gone home when Harry flushed. House affiliation itself wouldn't separate them, but they had constant shouting matches where they attached all sorts of other accusations to those words and used them. Harry would be remembering the times that Draco had called him soft and sentimental and incapable of complex emotions. "I can't do it. I want to get rid of it. That's all."

Harry frowned and stepped back from holding Draco, pacing back and forth, deep in thought. Draco remained sitting instead of trying to escape, the way he had immediately thought he would. This was interesting, unusual behavior from Harry, compelling enough to make him sit still and await the result.

Harry whipped towards him. "What if I could show you that _I _accept it?" he asked. "Would you come to terms with it then?"

Draco narrowed his eyes. "There's no way you can accept it," he said.

"Well, that's progress, since you didn't just snap that you were doing things the way a _Slytherin _would and flounce off," Harry muttered, ignoring the scowl Draco tossed his way. "And what makes you think I can't?"

The challenge heated Draco's blood in spite of everything. This was the way things had always gone between them, give and take, dart and cut, sometimes more like a duel than a normal conversation. He rose slowly off the couch, eyes locked on Harry. "Show me what you can do."

Harry flashed him the dark smile that preceded sex as much as dueling, and led him up the stairs.

* * *

Harry finally stepped back from the Pensieve, and finished dropping strands of memory into it. He nodded at Draco, who stared at him and said nothing. How _could _he say anything, when Harry had promised that he would accept the Dark Mark, and instead was showing him memories?

"This is the past," Draco whispered. "If you are going to accept it in the future, then you can't simply use memories like this and expect me to believe you."

Harry's face softened into a sneer. "I told you that I could show you I _accept _it. Present tense, Draco." He seized Draco by the left arm, making Draco wince, because the skin there was still tender from the Healer's attempts to burn the Mark off, and maneuvered him towards the Pensieve. "Not my fault if you mistook it."

Draco glared at him, but Harry's grip and jaw were both set in that tense fixture that meant he wasn't backing down any time soon. Draco finally sniffed in acquiescence and bent over the Pensieve. Harry bent with him.

Draco opened his mouth to object-why would Harry need to see his own memories, when he knew what had happened to make him accept Draco's Dark Mark, as if he really could?-but Harry hushed him, and then they landed on a battlefield.

Draco shuddered and forced himself to keep standing still. This was a memory of their eighth year in Hogwarts, the spring, when they had been only a fortnight away from leaving the school forever. The former Death Eaters had arisen then and attacked the school, attempting to kill Harry and Draco and other people they hated and considered traitors. They had oriented on Draco's Dark Mark to bypass the wards, using an enchantment that Draco hadn't even known was possible for someone who wasn't the Dark Lord.

Harry sprang over a mound of rubble that had come from a blasted castle wall, and bore Draco to the ground with some violence. Draco watched his past self open his mouth to protest, and Harry hushed him with a vicious clap of his hand over his mouth.

"I know a way to end the enchantment and reengage the wards and shove them back outside them," Harry snarled into his face. "And _you _will go along with it."

Draco, the real one, started as the present-time Harry reached around him and hooked an arm about his waist. "I know you remember as much about this as I do," Harry breathed into his ear. "But watch my face as I do this. _His _face, I mean, if you want to think of us as two separate people." He shoved Draco's head back around when Draco would have kept facing him and opened his mouth to ask a question.

Draco frowned and did as he was told, though he wondered what there could really be in an ancient memory to interest him.

Then he saw. Harry's face, in the past, was utterly tight and utterly focused, the way it got sometimes when he was concentrating on Draco's body, but not disgusted. And he never flinched as his hands picked up Draco's left arm and positioned it, holding his wand to the Dark Mark. He looked at it as if it was any normal scar on Draco's skin, his eyes wide and steady.

And the way he heated, almost burned, the Mark worked, and the Death Eaters reeled backwards as the wards of Hogwarts suddenly appeared in front of them, spitting and shimmering, and shoved them off the grounds. Harry in the past immediately covered Draco with a Shield Charm and raced after them.

Draco swallowed as the blackness signaled that memory had come to an end, and they flickered into another. He had only seen, in the past, how quickly Harry had left him, but he hadn't noticed-anything else.

"I think you'll like this one," _his _Harry whispered into his ear.

Draco thought it was a little early to say _that_, but he did recognize the room they appeared in, at least. A low white bed in front of a low brick fireplace, it was the room he'd taken over in Malfoy Manor and made his own, ages and wings apart from the one where he used to live. He had only a red rug on the floor and a green makeshift banner of all his old Slytherin ties on the walls.

He and Harry were writhing in the middle of the bed, in the middle of their first fuck.

This time, Draco didn't need direction from his own Harry. He prided himself on being intelligent as much as he prided himself on not taking unnecessary risks. He looked at the expression on past-Harry's face as he rose above Draco's panting, sweat-slicked body and began to thrust into him.

That Harry looked at the Dark Mark, and bent low to lick Draco's arm from his elbow to his wrist. His tongue passed over the snake and the skull. He never blinked.

Of course, he didn't stay long, either, pulling back and continuing the pivot-thrust of his hips, his eyes shut and the skin of his face becoming plastered against the bones as he desperately sought his own completion. But where Draco's own memory had filled in pulling him away with disgust, because of the short time he had touched the Mark, it was all too obvious, from the outside, that that wasn't what had happened.

He _had _had an excuse for not noticing, Draco thought defensively. He was receiving the best fuck of his life at the time.

That memory spiraled into darkness, too, before Draco got to watch himself come. He regretted that. He might not have learned as much that was interesting from it, but he could have drawn strength from the sight of himself in pleasure.

The third memory wasn't one that Draco knew. Then Harry, who had come in through the door of the drawing room, paused and shifted left, and Draco saw why he hadn't remembered it. He was sprawled asleep in front of the fire on the couch, his head tilted back and his mouth slightly open. One of the evenings that he'd waited up for Harry or word of Harry, he supposed, and lost the battle to slumber.

Past-Harry watched him in silence, then knelt down next to the couch. Draco's left arm dangled down towards the floor, and he moved it carefully back onto his stomach. Draco watched as the sleeve fell back and revealed the Dark Mark.

Past-Harry looked at it thoughtfully, but not with any visible change of expression. Then he nodded, as if listening to advice from someone who didn't want to raise their voice, and kissed the Dark Mark beneath the twining of the viper's body.

Draco's mouth went dry. Sure, he had just seen Harry _lick _the Mark, which should have ranked as the standard, but that had been in the middle of sex, and Draco knew, better than anyone, that Harry would do some mad things when they were fucking. But this was calm, in the middle of the night, and a kiss.

It was different.

Then Past-Harry rose to his feet, pushed the sleeve back into its proper place, and sat down in a chair across from the couch, picking up a book on the Dark Arts to read. Draco watched his past self, and he didn't see a soft smile settle across the lips; of course he didn't, because he'd been asleep. But if he _had _seen it, he wouldn't have been all that surprised.

The memory settled into darkness, too, focusing on the embers of the fire as the last sight. And Draco found himself brutally yanked out of the Pensieve and back into reality by Harry's hands on his shoulders. He didn't know if Harry had been with him in that last memory or not, but he definitely was _now_.

"Do you see?" Harry asked, every second that he wasn't kissing Draco and pressing him up against the wall. Draco slid to the wall, in the corner, pinned between it and the floor, and still Harry kissed him and pulled him off his clothes. "I can accept it. I never thought that much about it. I don't have to live with it like you do. But I _do _have to see it and touch it. And I can."

"I never knew," Draco whispered, when Harry released his mouth long enough to concentrate on a particularly trying shirt button. "You never-you never said anything about it."

Harry paused to look at him and raise an eyebrow. "Why should I? It was there, part of my life, but not obtrusive all the time. And you know that I'm not the sort to pick up conversation about things that are like that." He kissed Draco this time hard enough that plaster fell into his hair as his head was driven backwards.

Draco nodded, when he could, when Harry released his head and neck enough to do that. He had become Harry's lover because he saw and accepted a darkness in Harry that his friends never could. The part that _enjoyed _it when criminals tried to escape and he could use some curses on them. The part that leaped into battle with his blood and his passions alike beating. The part that fucked Draco until he was bloody, sometimes, and enjoyed that even more than he would have enjoyed gentle sex.

For the first time, Draco wondered if he also worked with Harry because Harry could see and accept his light-the parts of Draco that _wanted _to be better, the part that cared for Harry and his mum, the part that had tried to save his parents in the war.

"I can accept it, and so can you," Harry whispered, and he tugged his trousers and pants down and Draco's down far enough, and slicked his fingers with a whispered spell, and pressed them into Draco.

Draco gasped aloud as Harry thrust into him, and went on gasping, because Harry was right _there _and he was there, too, caught up with him, thrusting and flailing the way he had in that second memory, and even a little the way he had in the first memory, beneath Harry on a battlefield. The hazy thought came to him that that was the first time he'd been beneath Harry, properly under him.

"I can accept it," Harry whispered harshly, rocking into him. "And so can you."

He went on repeating that until Draco came. Draco never knew how many times.

* * *

Draco opened a glued-shut eye. He was still under Harry now, but that was because Harry was snoring on top of him, still inside him, and neither of them were going to be moving anywhere for some little while.

Slowly moving so as not to wake Harry, Draco pulled his left arm around and stared at the Dark Mark on it, visible because of the skewed way his shirt had been tugged.

After a second, he turned his arm and laid it down on the floor beneath him, so that the edge of the Mark was visible. Nothing more, nothing less.

If it was going to be part of his life, this was a good way to start.

_And a good way to bring it to my attention, _Draco thought, running his fingers through Harry's hair. _The only one who could have._

_The only one whose acceptance is enough to condition mine._

**The End.**


End file.
